mwc14

“It’s not every day that a new mobile operating system is born,” says Jolla’s Marc Dillon preaching to a congregation of the curious from atop a stool at Jolla’s booth at the 2014 Mobile World Congress. This is the world’s largest mobile device-focused gathering. The show which annually transforms Barcelona into a city of suits and queues and shiny things. Read More

One of the more interesting devices here at Mobile World Congress is Blackphone: a pro-privacy handset being developed by Spanish startup Geeksphone, in partnership with U.S. security company Silent Circle using a “security-oriented” Android build called PrivatOS. Read More

At Samsung’s MWC Developer Day today, the company introduced several software development kits with the hope of luring developers to its platforms. Among the kits were several aimed at the company’s just-announced wearables including the Gear 2 and Gear Fit. Samsung needs 3rd party developers to make these products successful.
Dr. Won-Pyo Hong, president and head of the Media… Read More

Sony’s new flagship Android, the Xperia Z2, risks being overshadowed here at MWC by Samsung’s latest electronic tub-thumper, the Galaxy S5. But not on the show floor at least — where a phalanx of Z2 are massed in Sony’s booth, ready for the masses to fondle. Read More

We came, we saw, we checked our heart rates. As Samsung moves into wearable territory with the new Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Gear 2 bands, including the Neo and the Fit, we found that the devices were less about taking photos, media sharing, and other frippery and more about active designs aimed at users who are running, hiking, and braving suburban environments. Read More

As the classic saying goes, don’t hate the player, hate the game. But HTC and Nokia couldn’t help themselves yesterday during Samsung’s big Galaxy S5 reveal and took to Twitter for a bit of internet trolling.
HTC, again, reminded its followers about a big reveal on March 25th. The President of HTC America threw down as well, tweeting the image comparing the gold Galaxy S5 to… Read More

Veteran professional social network LinkedIn grew up on the desktop and is in the midst of retooling its 277 million-user strong business for a mobile-focused digital world. Today it said it’s now just nine percentage points off having its ‘mobile moment’ — aka the point when the proportion of users visiting the service via mobile devices tips into a majority.
Speaking in… Read More

Samsung has quietly announced that there will be two variations of the Galaxy S5. One will run the quad-core Snapdragon 801 with a 2.5GHz clock speed along with another model powered by an octo-core Exynos SoC running at 2.1GHz.
8 cores. 2.1Ghz. All that power, all those cores. In the palm your sweaty little hands.
The details are still on the light side but Samsung has done this in the past. Read More

BlackBerry has a couple of new smartphones in the offing, including the first sourced from new strategic partner Foxconn. The first Foxconn BlackBerry is the Z3, a Nokia-like touchscreen smartphone with rounded sides, a 5-inch qHD display, a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon 400 processor, 1.5GB of RAM and 8GB of on board storage.
The Z3 is targeted specifically at customers in Indonesia, which is… Read More

Samsung just unloaded its mobile product pipeline in Barcelona. All at once, the company revealed the Galaxy S5, Gear 2, Gear Nano and Gear Fit. These are legitimately exciting products.
The Galaxy S5 packs new sensors and is finally waterproof like Sony’s smartphones. It’s pushing into phablet territory with a 5.1-inch, 1920×1080 display, and it comes with a fingerprint reader… Read More

Forget about the rest of Samsung’s MWC offerings. The Gear Fit is about the most exciting product announced in Barcelona today. It’s the first Samsung wearable that has a legitimate chance of catching on.
The Fit is focused to the fitness crowd – natch – but it packs enough features to be a hit with the general consumer. Like other wearables in this category, the Fit… Read More

Samsung has announced three new smartwatch devices at MWC this year, including the successor to last year’s Galaxy Gear, the Gear 2, as well as a sleeker version called the Neo, and a fitness- and fashion-focused wristband device called the Samsung Gear Fit.
The Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo both offer companion features for a user’s smartphone, which include the ability to receive… Read More

The Samsung Galaxy S5 is here, and now we know everything about the 2014 flagship from the Korean smartphone maker. It’s pushing into phablet territory with a 5.1-inch, 1920×1080 display, and it comes with a fingerprint reader on the home button, as well as a heart rate monitor around back near the camera flash. The Galaxy S5 is also dust and water resistant, which may be the… Read More

Samsung is introducing its Galaxy S5 smartphone today at a special event in Barcelona, but you don’t have to be there to watch the announcement. Samsung will be streaming the event live on its YouTube account and we’ll have the stream right here for you to watch, too, so bookmark this page and check back at 11 AM PT/2 PM ET to catch all the action.
In the meantime, check out… Read More

More than a few people were surprised when Facebook said it would pay $19 billion for messaging app startup WhatsApp, but today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today said that he believed it was actually worth more. “If we can do a good job with WhatsApp [and] grow it, it will be a huge business,” he said today during a keynote presentation at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Read More

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent of the U.S. government’s surveillance dragnet of Internet users has had one positive impact, according to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: it’s made rivals in the tech industry more open to working together.
“The NSA issues, I think they’re a real issue, especially for U.S. Internet… Read More

Blink and you would have missed HTC Mobile World Congress announcements. The struggling phone maker unveiled two perfectly acceptable, perfectly boring mid-range phones and a Folding@home-ish smartphone app. Called “Power To Give”, the project is aimed at crowdsourcing spare smartphone CPU cycles to help cure diseases. Because why not. Read More

HTC is wacky – in a good way. The smartphone company is one of the few that still does things that surprise me, and today’s MWC announcements are no exception. Sure, the Taiwanese company introduced a new mid-range handset that’s par for the course, but it also unveiled a new app and service that puts your smartphone to work when it’s not in use, for the good of all… Read More

The Blackphone, a security focused smartphone from Silent Circle and Geeksphone, is kicking off pre-sales today after an official unveiling back in January. The Blackphone is billed as the “world’s first smartphone which places privacy and control directly in the hands of its users,” which essentially means that it offers a forked version of Android called PrivatOS and… Read More

The Samsung Galaxy S5 will get its official debut in just a few hours at a special event in Barcelona at this year’s Mobile World Congress, but you can see what it looks like right now thanks to a massive leak of photos coming from two different sources, including SaudiAndroid and HardwareZone. The pics show a device that remains very similar to previous generations, with a strongly… Read More